Overtime Writer

explore-blog: The typewriters of famous authors. Hunter S....

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 15:13:02 -0400

The typewriters of famous authors.

Hunter S. Thompson, you badass.

Never thought I’d be so enthralled by a book about 2,663...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 08:00:00 -0400

Never thought I’d be so enthralled by a book about 2,663 miles of hiking, but by the time I finished it I was curled into a ball. I know much has been said about this book (and the Oprah sticker sure doesn’t help), but to anyone who’s ever lost someone and tried to figure out, quite literally, how to still place one foot in front of the other—there’s hardly a better read.

Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren’t a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.

The only way in which we can bring our creative resources fully...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 12:06:00 -0400

The only way in which we can bring our creative resources fully into play is by misjudging the nature of the task, by presenting it to ourselves as more routine, simple, undemanding of genuine creativity than it will turn out to be.

Albert Hirschman and the power of failure.

"Someone opened an emergency door at the back, letting in the sweet noise of their continuing..."

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 17:58:19 -0400

“Someone opened an emergency door at the back, letting in the sweet noise of their continuing mortality — the idle splash and smell of heavy rain.”

- John Cheever, The Country Husband

Why is Israel the most impoverished country in the developed world?

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 13:56:52 -0400

When the financial crisis struck the United States and Europe in 2008, destroying jobs and depleting bank accounts, Israelis managed to get by largely unscathed. Indeed, to some people, the country looked like a financial juggernaut. In 2009, “Start-Up Nation,” a book co-written by Dan Senor, who had been a spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority, in Iraq, was released; it attempted to explain Israel’s “economic miracle” with zingers like “the West needs innovation; Israel’s got it” and chapter titles such as “The Little Nation That Could.” In the years after the recession, the country continued to prosper; as the developed world grappled with the consequences of their public debts, Israel’s debt-to-G.D.P. ratio shrunk. Last September, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the Israeli economy as an “island of stability.”

So it came as a shock to many when, in May, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development released a report showing that, of the world’s thirty-four economically developed countries, Israel is the most impoverished. With a poverty rate of twenty-one per cent, Israel has a higher percentage of poor people than Mexico, Turkey, or debt-ridden Spain and Greece. The report’s findings made front-page headlines in Israel, and officials there scrambled to sound both indignant and unconcerned. They had some explaining to do: How does a nation with double the average growth rate of other countries in the developed world have a fifth of its population living in poverty?

One answer is that it may not. The O.E.C.D.’s report examined relative poverty, using as its yardstick the percentage of each country’s population earning less than half of that country’s median wage. By contrast, in the U.S., poverty is typically measured in absolute terms—a given household’s purchasing power. Some critics have suggested that this discredits the report, since, by the O.E.C.D.’s standard, even if everyone in the country were suddenly made ten times richer, the poverty level would remain unchanged. And yet even when measured in absolute terms, by Israel’s National Insurance Institute, twenty-two per cent of Israelis were still deemed to be living in poverty in 2011, the last time the N.I.I. conducted the survey. (The poverty rate in the U.S. that year was fifteen per cent, according to the Census Bureau.) … [Read more]

Malcolm has a secret, writerly sympathy for the hoarder. She...

Fri, 31 May 2013 18:27:00 -0400

Malcolm has a secret, writerly sympathy for the hoarder. She understands the mad desire to hold on to every piece of accumulated material, the fear of throwing out something precious. Art, she is fretfully aware, can be too ruthless in its cleaning operations.

(Zoë Heller, in the latest NYRB.)

Most street style blogs should be called “bored White girl wearing shorts.”

Mon, 27 May 2013 10:38:56 -0400

Most street style blogs should be called “bored White girl wearing shorts.”

thenewinquiry: But if the radical book-lifter is primarily...

Mon, 27 May 2013 10:36:00 -0400

thenewinquiry:

But if the radical book-lifter is primarily male, is it true that the kleptomaniac is mostly female? Look into almost any definition of the disorder and you’ll usually find some variation of the following distinction: “more common among women.” Just as women are more susceptible to have body dysmorphia or to become compulsive buyers, so the thinking goes, they are also more prone to develop an uncontrollable impulse to steal. Shteir theorizes that “people who feel excluded in one way or another are most likely to steal.” Yet the slipperiness of the boundary between stealing and shoplifting, and between shoplifting and kleptomania, also attests to a possible gender bias: Why do we call a woman who repeatedly steals a kleptomaniac but call a man who does a serial thief? Why are we so quick to internalize the woman’s transgression but externalize the man’s?

-“Trivial Pursuits” by Ruth Margalit

"The not paying for things was intoxicating."

Fri, 24 May 2013 15:56:00 -0400

““The not paying for things was intoxicating.””

- (Philip Roth, American Pastoral).

I wrote about kleptomania in literature, from Daniel Defoe to Jennifer Egan, for The New Inquiry.

theparisreview: Have you ever heard Virginia Woolf speak? On a...

Thu, 23 May 2013 14:50:24 -0400

theparisreview:

Have you ever heard Virginia Woolf speak?

On a related note: Why does she sounds German?

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off — the indie recut. Anyone?...

Wed, 22 May 2013 16:14:06 -0400

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off — the indie recut.

Anyone? Anyone?

theparisreview: In Japanese, tsundoku means, “the act of buying...

Fri, 17 May 2013 10:48:41 -0400

theparisreview:

In Japanese, tsundoku means, “the act of buying books and not reading them, leaving them to pile up.”

“Occasionally, an American or two spoiled the tasteful...

Fri, 17 May 2013 09:34:00 -0400

“Occasionally, an American or two spoiled the tasteful palette with vacation colors. They shot into the town square like clowns fired from a cannon, mugging their snack-smeared faces at some imagined camera and releasing high-strung moods as if by megaphones: I have arrived in your historic city, and I am the happiest person you will ever know! Let me rub my joy on you!”

(Ben Marcus, “The Dark Arts.” Polaroid by Bastian Kalou.)

Excited to see “No Joy” at Glasslands tonight. Their...

Thu, 16 May 2013 12:06:00 -0400

Excited to see “No Joy” at Glasslands tonight. Their music doesn’t grab you by the shirt collar and shake you, like some others. But it has more of a pile-on effect: cool and slick songs, a raspy vibe that feels so effortless in recent Montreal bands. Anyway, this is “Lunar Phobia.” And this is me signing off, and going back to work with my sad desk lunch.

Lost in translation

Thu, 09 May 2013 23:19:00 -0400

On what it means when translators introduce words they think should be in the original text, but aren’t:

In Lawrence’s Women in Love Ursula reflects that she’s not even tempted to get married. Her sister Gudrun agrees and carries on, “Isn’t it an amazing thing … how strong the temptation is, not to!” Lawrence comments: “They both laughed, looking at each other. In their hearts they were frightened.” A recent Italian edition of the book offers something that, translated back into English, would give, “They both burst out laughing, looking at each other. But deep in their hearts they were afraid.”

Experimenting over the years I’ve realized that if I ask a class of students to translate this into Italian approximately half will introduce that “but.” It appears to be received wisdom that one doesn’t laugh if one is afraid; hence when Lawrence puts the two things together, translators feel a “but” is required to acknowledge the unusualness of this state of affairs. Lawrence on the other hand suggests that nothing is more common than laughing and being afraid; one laughs because afraid, in order to deny fear.

THE MOST DEPRESSING FUNNIEST BLOG YOU WILL READ...

Wed, 08 May 2013 14:09:00 -0400

THE ~~MOST DEPRESSING~~ FUNNIEST BLOG YOU WILL READ TODAY:

http://theworstroom.tumblr.com/

"A Lot of Sorrow" -- The National at MoMA PS1

Mon, 06 May 2013 14:46:00 -0400

After four hours and fifty-five minutes, Matt Berninger, the lead vocalist of The National, decided to have some fun. “Sorrow found me when I was young / Sorrow waited, Sorrow won,” he raced through the first two lines of the lyrics like a record out of whack, then paused and smiled.

If his voice sounded slightly hoarse, it was hard to blame him. The National was taking part in a grueling experiment: the band members were to sing their song “Sorrow,” a brooding, almost-monotonous, three-minute number, over and over again, for six hours, as part of a duration-based performance piece by Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, titled “A Lot of Sorrow.”

As the band wrapped up the song and then rekindled again—all in all, they would play “Sorrow” a hundred and five times, according to Pitchfork—the audience erupted in thunderous applause, as if hearing it for the very first time. Berninger’s voice, a dark, beautiful baritone that feels just as enveloping in sold-out arenas as it does in bed with the shades drawn, created a kind of winsome claustrophobia. About eight renditions in, and the words started to lose any meaning for me. The syllables began to wear off, like the colors of a favorite t-shirt. Instead, all I heard was the strum of the guitars—a melodious hum that worked up to a soft crescendo. Then the words resurfaced, new and familiar all at once.

“I don’t want to get over you,” Berninger sang, for the umpteenth time. Almost six hours in, “Sorrow” felt like an incantation.

Photo shows the set list.

My review of James Lasdun's "Give Me Everything You Have"

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 19:12:28 -0400

How does one write about obsessive love? Well, if “Lolita,” “The Kreutzer Sonata” and “Wuthering Heights” are to be any kind of guide, then the answer is: Magnificently. But what if our focus is not on the Humbert Humberts, the Pozdnyshevs, the Heathcliffs of our world? What if our narrator is not the one obsessed but is rather the object of obsession? And what if the nightmarish events that he describes – not without a sense of foreboding – are real? Add to that the peculiarities that define the age of the Internet (Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, she became a cyberbully), and the result is the fascinating new book “Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked,” by James Lasdun.

Lasdun, an accomplished British poet and novelist living in New York, first met a woman he calls Nasreen in the fall of 2003. He was teaching a fiction workshop at a place he refers to as Morgan College, and Nasreen, a quiet and reticent student who sat at the back of the room, quickly turned out to be the star of his class. Born in Iran to a family that had fled to the United States after the 1979 revolution, Nasreen based the ambitious chapters of her novel-in-progress in Tehran, during the last days of the Shah. Not only was Lasdun impressed with her work, but when he subsequently praised her in class, he was taken by her coolheaded response: “This too, this unflustered reaction of hers, seemed to me the mark of a real writer.”

For two years after that course ended, Lasdun didn’t hear from Nasreen. Then one day she emailed to inform him that she had finished her manuscript, and asked if he would he read it. (MFA teachers: Beware of ex-students bearing galleys!) He replied amicably, politely declined her request, citing lack of time, but felt strongly enough about her talent that he put her in touch with his own agent. This triggered a series of friendly exchanges between them – “That she was younger than me, a woman, and Iranian were all things that gave the prospect of this friendship a certain appealing novelty,” he writes – whose nature at first struck Lasdun as harmless, though the correspondence soon became increasingly flirtatious on her end. When Lasdun then tried to make it clear that his intentions were not romantic – dropping hints about his happy marriage and mentioning an upcoming trip with his kids – Nasreen’s reaction should have perhaps alarmed him more than it did: She replied by accusing Lasdun of having had an affair with another former student. Later she rescinded her charge, and Lasdun seems to have had no qualms about letting this odd fabulation go. … [Read more]

:) From this week’s New Yorker.

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 13:55:00 -0400

From this week’s New Yorker.

If Jill Abramson were a man...

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 17:10:00 -0400

If Jill Abramson were a man...:

annfriedman:

She’s a source of widespread frustration and anxiety who is demoralizing, uncaring, morale-draining, and very unpopular. He demands excellence and relevance.

She is difficult to work with, unreasonable, impossible, stubborn. He has a strong vision and insists on seeing it carried out.

She is AWOL and disengaged. He attended Sundance and SXSW.

She is not a naturally charismatic person, not approachable, tough as nails. He is direct.

She is brusque, blunt, and dismissive. He does not like to waste time.

She is uncaring, unable to march forward or provide reassurance, and doesn’t make people feel good. He is not your mommy.

She is condescending. He is the boss.